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Previously, I wrote about Satan’s Great Desire which is to bring about disunity in your local church, somehow convincing you that the people in your church are no longer worthy of your love. I ended by giving the encouragement that God has equipped us to build and maintain this kind of unity and that all we need to do is use the tools he has equipped us with. How has he equipped us? According to Ephesians 4, he has given each of us a spiritual gift that is to be used to build unity through service to one another. 

This area of spiritual gifting is noticeably Christ-centered and along the way Paul makes three big points:

First, Christ is the giver of gifts. Paul goes all the way back to Psalm 68 and shows that this Psalm speaks of the resurrected Jesus giving gifts to the people he loves. These aren’t gifts wrapped in paper that we can open and put on display, but gifts in the form of abilities we possess. Christ doesn’t toss these gifts out to Christians in a random way, but thoughtfully and deliberately gives a gift to each person as he sees fit. Christ has a plan in giving out these gifts. He is the one who determines who will receive each gift and how much of that gift each person and each community of Christians will receive.

Second, Christ gives gifts that are diverse. If we look throughout the whole New Testament we’ll find several lists of these gifts and when we put them together we find that there are at least 20 of them; there are undoubtedly many more than the ones listed. What we see is that Christ gives out diverse gifts. In this letter Paul gives a partial list and one that focuses specifically on teaching. Some Christians are given gifts of teaching and here he lists apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers. The job of these teachers is not to do all the ministry or to use all the gifts, but to shepherd and teach and equip every Christian to use his own gift. These teachers are to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Why? So each one can then use his gift in a fuller, more comprehensive way. 

Third, Christ’s gifts are given to bring unity through service. Paul makes a surprising statement here. He says that I am not the minister of my church; neither are the other pastors. Who are the ministers? Everyone is! The pastors are the shepherds, the equippers, the leaders, but we are all ministers. We are to do this work together.

There are profound implications to this. This brings into focus a passage like Titus 2 which instructs older women to disciple younger women—to do that work of ministry. Your pastors simply cannot disciple young women to love their husbands and children nearly as well as some of the older women can. So we need older women to do that work of ministry! Now we see that the work of visiting those who are sick or caring for those who are in need is the job of each one of us. We are all to minister to one another.

This leads us to one important application: You need to plant yourself in a local church. Why? Because you need the gifts of the Christians there and they need your gifts. There is a church that is incomplete without you and you are incomplete without that church. You do not have all that you need, all that is necessary for your growth in holiness. 

Each of us needs to learn how the Lord has gifted us and each of us then needs to use our gifts to minister to one another. How do we learn how we are gifted? We serve! We just do the work of the ministry, whether that is setting up and cleaning up or visiting people in hospital or making meals or doing one-on-one discipleship, and we allow the Lord to reveal our strengths and open up opportunities. In your church you may find that you have teachers and evangelists, encouragers and discerners and servers and so many others. And that’s perfect because I’m sure you then also have people there who need to be served and people who lack discernment or people who are desperate for encouragement or people who need to respond to the gospel. There Lord has made it so that each of us has a gift designed to serve the people around us.

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I have been engaged in a study of the second half of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and, not surprisingly, the themes from that letter have been resonating in my mind over the past few weeks. I have been struck by Paul’s emphasis on the importance of love and unity in the local church. On the one hand it’s kind of obvious—we need to love the Christians around us—but on the other hand, the personal implications are profound. I’ve always known that God calls me to love the people I covenant with in my local church, but until now I haven’t been quite so aware of the danger of falling out of love.

Paul did not seem to have any particular concern with the unity of this church in Ephesus. As far as we can tell he wasn’t writing because the church was splintering apart or because he had heard rumors of their disunity. But perhaps this was even more reason for him to address the issue. Paul knew that Satan is the great enemy of God and his people, and one of his enduring tactics to disrupt the church and to hinder our witness to the world is to bring about disunity. How does he do this? He does it by first eroding the love between brothers and sisters in Christ.

Wherever there is disunity there will first be the absence of love and the presence of pride. Satan’s great desire for your church and for mine is to fracture the people in those churches into camps, into groups built along lines that have no business dividing us. We may know this in the abstract, but we need to make it personal. Here is what we need to see: God wants me and commands me to love the other people in my church; Satan wants me to hate them. God wants me to feel a great deal of unity with those people; Satan wants there to be an issue between us—something, anything, to drive us apart.

Have you ever paused to think about this? Do you know that Satan is actively working in your local church right now to drive a wedge between you and the other people there? He wants you to hate that other person—or at least to stop loving that other person—and he is constantly giving you opportunity to do just that. A quick survey of church history, whether on a global or local scale, will show just how successful he has been. He will split churches into factions by first making those Christians find reasons not to love one another, not to bear with one another in love.

Do you feel alienated from someone in your church? Then Satan is already sowing the seeds of disunity, the seeds of what it may take to split your church right up the middle. Do you outright hate someone in your church? Then Satan has already scored a victory and your church is already breaking apart. God then calls you to immediately work to restore the love that needs to exist between you.

There is good news, though. We need to be aware of Satan’s tactics, but we don’t need to be afraid. When Paul writes to the Ephesian church he does not tell them that they have to build unity from nothing. Instead, he says that the unity they are to have, and the unity we are to have, already exists and we just need to maintain it. Paul uses a metaphor to illustrate this. Twice in the letter he has said that he is a prisoner of the Lord—that he is in prison, in chains, chained to his guard. He returns to that language to say that believers are chained together. You and the other people in your local church, you are bound together. It’s like there is a chain that runs from you to the person down the row from you, and to the person beside him, and on throughout the building. You are all chained together in unity through Christ, through what he has done in each one of you.

What he says is that if your local church is to be unified, you need to grab ahold of that existing unity and hang on to it for dear life. No matter what your differences are, you cannot allow yourself to be divided from the Christians around you. How can you do that? How can you maintain that oneness? Well, it turns out that God has already thought about that and that he has already equipped you to do that. You just need to use the tools he has provided. I guess that may be a topic for another day (Hint: Paul goes on to discuss spiritual gifting and speaking truth in love).

For now, though, you may do well to read just the first few verses of Ephesians 4 and to consider the love God calls you to have and to express toward the people in your local church. These are the people God has called you to love, to serve, to minister to. Do you love them? Are you growing in love for them? Wherever that love is diminishing, wherever that love is growing cold, Satan is pushing his way into your church; he may just be using you as his agent for disunity.

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It has come as kind of a shock to me, now that I am a pastor and preaching on a regular basis, that the vast majority of the sermons I preach will be rather ordinary. I will study hard and pray hard and work hard, I’ll get started early in the week and give it a couple of days to germinate and give it another look-through early on Sunday morning, and at the end of it all I will have a rather ordinary sermon. Not a bad one, but an ordinary one. It certainly won’t be the sermon I had envisioned when I first sat down with my Bible and a cup of hot coffee on Monday morning. In my mind I’ve got these visions of greatness; before me on the pulpit I’ve got this reality of ordinariness.

Last week a friend asked me how my sermon had gone and I said, “Somewhere between being receiving a standing ovation and being pelted with dead cats.” That seems to about capture it, because honestly, I don’t know. It’s not like the people were weeping and throwing themselves to the ground in sorrow and repentance, and it’s not like they all just got up and left. Their response was as ordinary as my sermon—some people expressed gratitude, a couple of people offered correctives or improvements, and the majority said nothing while showing nothing out-of-the-ordinary.

I guess when I had considered preaching I figured I’d be able to knock it out of the park every Sunday—that if I began early enough in the week and gave myself enough time to study I would always be able to put together an amazing sermon, or an above-average one at least. If I just put in the time, I would be able to do something extraordinary and put together something sublime. But even in those weeks that I can dedicate a full 30 or 40 hours to sermon preparation, Sunday rolls around and I find myself wishing for just another week or just another two weeks, to iron out the kinks and get the sermon where I hoped it could be.

This month I am preaching through the second half of Ephesians, a text that really deals with the ordinary Christian life. What does it look like to live a life that has been transformed by this gospel of grace through faith? Paul lays it out in all its ordinariness. It is not a life of doing things that makes all the world take notice and declare your virtues, but a life of quiet, humble service and a long, slow growth in godliness. And yet I still find myself hoping to write extraordinary sermons on being ordinary. Until now I had missed the irony. 

I was comforted to read that Philip Ryken has long since stopped trying to be more than ordinary, or at least he has seen the value of taking joy in the ordinary or mediocre. Michael McKinley recently heard Ryken say that “as long as he had been faithful, he didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not it subjectively felt like his sermon had gone well.” He pointed to the Westminster Larger Catechism:

Q: How does Christ make intercession?

A: Christ makes intercession, by his appearing in our nature continually before the Father in heaven, in the merit of his obedience and sacrifice on earth, declaring his will to have it applied to all believers;Answering all accusations against them, and procuring for them quiet of conscience, notwithstanding daily failings, access with boldness to the throne of grace, and acceptance of their persons and services.

And isn’t that a remarkable thing! Our persons and services are accepted on the basis of Christ’s intercession; our ordinary sermons are precious in his sight.

The many years of writing articles on this blog should have prepared me to accept ordinary efforts. After all, the nature of the blog is such that I simply cannot make every article exactly what it could be if I had all the time in the world. I typically have just 40 or 50 or 60 minutes to take my thoughts from words and phrases bouncing around my brain to words typed out and posted on the Internet. Many of these things could be said much better, but that is not the nature of the medium and it’s not the reality of life. So I do what I can.

I guess the same is true of preaching. The reality is that I need to be standing in the pulpit at Grace Fellowship Church on Sunday morning at 10 o’clock and by then I need to have a sermon prepared. Between then and now I may have days of quiet study at my desk and I may experience an unusual sense of God’s grace. Or between then and now I may have to spend days counselling and parenting and evangelizing and everything else that life brings. But that pulpit and those Christians will be there on Sunday morning and I need to be ready. I will not be as ready as I’d like to be, but I will be as ready as the Lord wants me to be.

I am coming to see that the beauty of the ordinary sermon is that the Lord is pleased to use even it, which drives home the lesson of 1 Corinthians 2:

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

Beneath and behind and inside those ordinary sermons is the extraordinary God who specializes in displaying his power through my weakness, my ordinariness.

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that I’ve got a thing for infographics. What appeals to me about them is their ability to display information visually. Just as there are many words that can be used to describe any one fact, there are also many ways to display facts.

Today I’ve got an infographic for you, and one that I is going to kick off a series called “Visual Theology”—an attempt to display theology using a combination of words and pictures.  I have asked one designer to take a shot at displaying theordo salutis, which is to say, the order of salvation, which refers to the sequence of conceptual steps involved in the salvation of the Christian. I will let the graphic explain it from here.

You can download this infographic in a high-quality PDF (10 MB).

If you have other ideas for theological infographics, please feel free to leave a comment.